So I got back from five days of awesomeness a few hours ago. Josh and Casey were phenomenal hosts, Shreyas was impossibly delightful (as one might imagine) as an adventuring companion, and JiffyCon was sublime.

The first game I played was Transantiago, which was as good as I thought it would be. I think the playtest pointed out some important things, and also showed that the game is really playable and full of vitality; I can’t wait to see its final incarnation.

Meg Baker saw me standing, hopeless and indecisive, by the signup sheets for the afternoon session, took pity on me, and squeezed me into her full game of 1001 Nights. I gushed at Meg at length about her game, and I believe most of the rest of the indie RPG world (you know, the people who played at least one indie RPG before.. yesterday, unlike myself) already knows that 1001 is fantastic, so I won’t gush too much. But I adore that you choose dice for beauty, that you tell stories within stories, and that the mechanics are so elegant and simple– there’s so much complexity with the individual stories and the meta-story, and playing characters which, in turn, play multiple characters, that it’s great that the dice are so simple. You get all of that dense, nuanced complexity with the plot and not the mechanics; the difference between 1001 Nights and D&D is the difference between baklava and a calculus textbook. Plus, the group was a blast to game with.

I was really excited that I got a chance to meet so many new people, and got to connect with so many online friends. Emily and Kat (I wish I knew her screenname, if any) really kind of encouraged me to dust off the wacky artsy Pygmalion concept I had a while ago, so a lot of ideas for that game started to come together during my layover in Cincinatti tonight. I’ll type those up either tonight or tomorrow. And I am now the proud owner of both Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon, not to mention the first three volumes of Scott Pilgrim! So I’m knee-deep in reading material for quite some time.